4 ms·

I genuinely had no idea this was the case - and yet it’s so brilliant, and pretty much necessary - considering the amount of backgrounds and details in them - f

I genuinely had no idea this was the case - and yet it’s so brilliant, and pretty much necessary - considering the amount of backgrounds and details in them - for these games to have fit in the 1.44MB that a floppy disk offered. I had basically only really considered this with Flash in the 90’s, when dial-up was a thing and, similarly; raster images would cause size issues. It’s fascinating as hell to learn that this is how these games were put together.

Jolter 4y ago
1,44 MB was the capacity of the High Density 3 1/4” disks that were introduced for the IBM PC in 1987. The target system for Sierra’s first adventures (The Wizard and the Pricess, King’s Quest et al) was the Apple II, whose floppies could take a whopping 113.75 KB per side. Perhaps more importantly, it only had 48 kB of RAM, and a traditional full color bitmap image would have taken up a bit more than half of that, leaving very little for game logic, I/O routines, text etc. Using vector graphics was a necessity for getting several full-color screens onto one floppy. You can read a long-form series of articles about how Ken Williams implemented this game engine at https://www.filfre.net/tag/sierra/page/8/ https://www.filfre.net/tag/sierra/page/8/ .
- pvg 4y ago
  140-ish K per side, more typically. The 113.75KB format was relatively short-lived.